


And the Universe Lies Upon Your Mouth

by sarahworm



Series: Halflings Born and Made [1]
Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Les Fées | Diamonds and Toads - Charles Perrault, Sleeping Beauty (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/F, I mean they're all basically OCs because this is a hard retelling/crossover, I think I know how it ends but not exactly how we get there;, the rating is mostly there as a cover for vague darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-07-27 07:33:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16214408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahworm/pseuds/sarahworm
Summary: It was the wanting that doomed me.They said later that I was rude, or ungrateful, but I’m not stupid. I know how to put on manners, like a cloak; I know how to playact my sister’s docility.No, after I had served her as, well, serviceably as a country girl could think to do, that witch pinned me with her gaze. She curled her lip, and said, with a sneer, “honesty is the best policy, my dear.”





	1. The Witch

It was the wanting that doomed me. 

                They said later that I was rude, or ungrateful, but I’m not stupid. I know how to put on manners, like a cloak; I know how to playact my sister’s docility.

                No, after I had served her as, well, serviceably as a country girl could think to do, that witch pinned me with her gaze. She curled her lip, and said, with a sneer, “honesty is the best policy, my dear.”

                Oh, I know about honesty.

                I came home spitting curses and salamanders, sending my mother shrieking out to the goat-house. It was Rana who took my arm, whispered tremulously – she was still afraid of her jewels, then – “what happened?”

                “The old hag said it didn’t count because I’d come seeking a reward,” I shouted in the face of my younger sister, who flinched as a snake stitched itself together and fell from my lips. “It only matters if you don’t know what you’re getting. How’s that for a moral, eh, little sister? If only I could be a beautiful fool like you, I could be vomiting diamonds too.”

                “That’s not fair,” she said, but she was already backing away, cutting me a cold glance and then escaping to the forest where she spent more of her days.

                So I was left to pace and rage under the old loft, calling blame down upon my mother and her house. I collected the creatures into a tub and plunked it onto her kitchen table in retribution.

***

                And so my sister’s fortunes and mine were reversed. Where I had been the lavished favorite, the firstborn and the spitting image of my mother, I was now just cast aside, useful for fetching and carrying and not talking. Mother had it in her head that Rana’s self-creating dowry would win her a prince, and she spent days determining how to best go about this. Finally she decided that we would make it appear that Rana’s gift came at great cost to her voice, and was to be used sparingly. To make her few words that much more powerful in the hopes that men would be less inclined to tie her up and make her scream.

                My mother protected us, in her way. So to this end, Rana and I were to work out a sign language, one only the two of us could decipher. I would accompany my sister, when she made her fortune, as her mute maid.

                Rana was only fifteen; I was two years older, and between us the thought of running never came up. And for many months, I continued to resent her gift and the good status it was sure to bring her.

                For her part, Rana, refused to even look at me for days, until mother slapped her across the face and commanded that we make this plan work. And so our months passed in creation and study. Mother began walking into town for the errands instead of Rana. The official story was that we had been taken ill, and were recovering, save the loss of our poor young voices.

                It wasn’t that witched and curses were unheard of in our little forest village. I wasn’t sure who mine had been, I had some guesses, and none of them were wild women you’d want to claim an acquaintance to, positive or negative, not without having been clearly marked. Well, we were marked, but to what end still eluded me.

                That was the problem with witches, and with witch-magic. It was unpredictable. Here we were, assuming our curses were forever, and they could just as easily be gone the next week, as far as anyone knew. Everyone heard tales of foolish men who’d claimed their daughters had been blessed or cursed, only for the effect to wear off the moment anyone paid attention. More popular still was the story of the prince who turned back into a frog on his unfortunate bride’s wedding night, neither of them having realized that true love’s kiss was only a temporary reprieve.

                Of the witches themselves, the stories were fewer. Some people said that any woman born under a falling star would turn out to be one when she grew up. Some said that the witches came about when a wild woman stole the Fae’s book of magic, long ago, and since then she and her twelve daughters roamed the earth and made trouble.

                What everyone agreed was that once upon a time, we’d had the Fae as neighbors, who were perhaps too fond of rules but predictable in that way. And then they’d gone, and now the only magic lay in the hands of the witches, who never seemed to use it in a way that people understood or found convenient.

***

By the time mother took Rana off to the market for the miraculous reveal, I had created quite a little menagerie for myself. I was supposed to toss the products of my words outside immediately, when I had to speak at all, but in defiance of my mother I had begun keeping the prettiest specimens to myself, living in a pair of old milking buckets.

Rana burst through the door ahead of mother, carrying a pile of goods I later found had been gifted to them out of the villagers’ sheer, sheer kindness. “It worked, Vi,” she said, excited enough to risk some rare affection. A ruby bubbled up on her lips like blood.

“Use your hands,” mother said, automatically, but she needn’t have bothered. Rana’s hands were too burdened to be any use. “Your sister is going to see me from rags to riches, Violet.”

See _her_ , I noticed.

It turned out that a young merchant’s son had been in attendance that day, and had rushed back to his father’s house with all the urgency of a man in love, as my mother put it.

As a man seeking a good investment, I thought. But I said not a word, and by the next day, an invitation for dinner the following week had been extended to us.

My mother was delighted to accept. “It’s not a prince, sweeting,” she said, pinching Rana’s cheek in excitement. “But it’s a start. Now, you’ll do exactly as I say.”

Rana, newly beloved daughter, smiled. I saw the lines tighten around her eyes.

***

                I was ordered to do the hemming on my sister’s new dress before the dinner. They’d picked up the silk and the pattern in town, my mother was piecing the bodice together, and I was hemming as Rana produced her required jewels for the day.

                In addition to the sign language, she’d been ordered to figure out what kind of control she had over the products of her mouth. So far she’d made little progress. A flower drifted down towards me.

                I signaled to ask if she was dreading the meeting.

                “No.”

                _Why?_

                She glanced around to be sure mother wasn’t near and then hissed, viciously, “as soon as I’ve got a signed marriage license I’m free of you both. I don’t care what mother says. She’ll have her little store of gems and I’ll get the husband to do as I please.”

                _That’s dangerous._

She laughed. “No more dangerous than growing up with the two of you mocking me and denigrating me my whole life.” An emerald nicked her lip on the way out and she lifted the handkerchief she always carried now.

                _Your curse is still a curse,_ I signed.

                She stepped away from me, jerking the half-finished hem out of my hands. “I won’t let your misery drag me down anymore. I offered you my sympathy but you don’t deserve my pity. I’m taking my way out.”

                I stood up to follow her. “Embrace the cage if you want, but you’ve been cursed just as much as I have. If only that witch could see you now, how easily you’ve become a spoiled brat.” A scorpion crawled up my cheek and I held out my hands. “But if you insist on leaving me behind, at least let me finish that damn hem.”

***

                The merchant’s son looked like a ferret. From the moment we entered, his beady little eyes tracked my sister as she took off her brand new cloak and primly offered him her hand.

                It wasn’t of him I was worried. He seemed a small-minded and narrow-focused little man, content to calculate what new style of carpeting my sister could buy him. I believed her when she said she could handle him.

                No, it was his father I was afraid of. He looked at my sister not simply like she could be milked, but like she could be devoured, eaten whole and turned straight into power for his family.

                When we were nearly halfway through the meal, he began asking her questions. I think she was irked by the attention – she and the son had been conversing as amiably as any man interested in talking and any woman willing to indulge him could. But the father began asking things like, had she ever had a desire to see the mountains? The sea? Had she dreamed of being presented at royal court? Could she sing prettily? Did she shy from the companionship of strangers, or did she embrace it?

                I didn’t mean to ruin things for my sister. I had been watching that man’s face, and I meant to protect her.

                When Rana said that she’d be partial to learning singing in small doses, I burst out, “but not like this, Rana!”

                “Let the young lady speak as she wishes,” the old man admonished me. The son was staring at me, as I remembered that was supposed to be unable to speak.

                I turned to the father, suddenly angry. “You don’t own her yet, sir,” I cried, “and her curse is not for you to exploit!”

                And with that, a large toad dropped to my plate and hopped into the soup tureen.

                Immediately the merchant and his son recoiled as my sister blanched. My mother sprang up and dragged me from my chair by my shoulder, and spun on her heel, issuing apologies and promises to remove my offending presence from the scene at once. I was pulled from the room, my threadbare cloak still hanging on the wall.

                I turned back in time to see my sister clinging to her suitor’s hand, telling him that I was wretched and jealous and did _not_ speak for her, as diamonds half the size of my fist rained from her lips.

                I guess she’d learned how to control them after all.


	2. The Woods

My mother didn’t even want to let me back in the house. Only when I threatened her with the buckets of creatures I’d left tucked under the roof did she let me go in to retrieve them. And when I emerged from the loft, she took my arm and thrust me out again, slamming the door in my face.

                With nowhere else to go, I returned to the well. And I sat, leaning back against the rough stone, trying to think of what to do. I could try to find work as a servant, one without a voice – but who could take me, and what a secret to keep for the rest of my life!

                I could try to join a circus, or sell myself at royal court as a grotesque attraction. But even if I could handle that kind of attention, no patron would want to take on the risk of someone so obviously witch-marked.

                I was destitute, with no prospects and nothing to my name but the clothes on my back. Well, and four little green lizards, some lethargic snails, a couple of finely-colored geckos, and one magnificent snake. I’d never been able to hold onto the frogs.

                When I’d finished resting and weeping a bit, I stood and drew some water. I drank my fill and poured some into the bottom of one bucket for my only attendants.

                Then I leaned over the edge of the well and howled. I screamed for what felt like hours, screamed myself hoarse, until the water below teemed. When I felt empty, I straightened up and wiped my mouth. Let her see what it meant to be marked.

***

                I walked in the direction of the setting sun. The woods had always been Rana’s domain. I didn’t know where I was heading.

                When night fell I stopped and curled myself at the foot of a tree. I wrapped the snake around my wrist to ward off strangers and I slept.

                On the second day, I came upon a patch of berries. I fed one to the lizards first, and when they did not keel over, I fell on the bushes myself, letting the creatures out to seek their own food. Emboldened by my success, I climbed a tree in search of acorns, and when I found a stream that night, soaked them until they were soft enough to chew. I had no luck starting a fire, but I fell asleep that night sated, my undesirable words ranged around me almost like pets. They were surprisingly reluctant to running off.

                On the third day, my luck seemed to vanish as quickly as it had come. I walked all day with no change, save the growing holes in my thin shoes. As dusk fell, I crept closer to despair. I was hungry again, and lonely, and the forest seemed unending. I was sure I would never leave it, and I would die there, surrounded by amphibians.

                Then I saw a glimmer through the trees. At least I thought I did. It was a bit like trying to catch sight of a lightning bug. But I picked up my pails once again and began walking towards it.

                It grew brighter as I drew closer, until suddenly I was looking through a break in the trees at a clearing with a small house in it. Light shone from the sole window besides a rather shabby-looking door, but I saw no flickering or hint of movement inside. What caught my attention anyway was the vegetable garden.

                My mother, with all her faults, did raise me not to steal – but I was very hungry, and I figured I was looking at the back of the house – surely, at this time of night, the owners would be looking elsewhere. And anyway, there was no fence.

                I put my buckets down and stuck to the shadows, skirting the trees to the corner of the garden. I came to the peas first, and I snapped off only a couple from each pole. There were onions next, and carrots, which I figured needed thinning anyway.

                I was just setting in on a very boisterous lettuce plant when the door crashed open. I stumbled back on my hands, dropping my pickings, blinded by the blast of light.

                I woman stood in the doorway, tall her eyes seeming to flash as she scanned the yard and then found me. In the background I heard something like a metal clang.

                “I knew of a woman once who faced a very harsh punishment for stealing lettuce,” she said, but she sounded more amused than devastatingly angry. Still, I was too terrified to speak. She looked over me again, and her brow wrinkled just a bit – maybe she’d just noticed how young I was. “Who-” she began, but cut off, looking at something over my shoulder. I turned just in time to see the two geckos skittering towards me before running up my arm; my snake curled around my ankle. Behind me, I saw the pail overturned where I’d left it.

                “Well,” said the woman, “isn’t that interesting.” She snapped a finger, and suddenly I lurched to my feet, my stolen goods once more clutched in my fists.

                The witch strode towards me and stood studying my face. Closer, I could see that she wore simple peasant clothes, like mine, but which were deceptively finely stitched. My witch had been at first haggard and stooped, and then suddenly, impossibly beautiful. This one had a plain face framed by auburn hair, almost normal-looking, save the eyes that kept shining as they looked at me.

                “Well?” she said again.

                I supposed I was meant to beg for my life. “Um,” I said, “I’m very sorry for trespassing. I have no food, and no home, and nothing to pay.” A frog dropped to my wrist. “But I’ll never bother you again, if you let me go.” Another frog joined the first, and both hopped to my shoulder.

                The witch laughed. “And where would you go, little halfling?”

                I shrugged, even as my heart sank. Surely the witch’s cottage meant that there was no civilization nearby. “If you let me work for the food,” I said slowly, “I could be a good servant.”

                She laughed again. I had never known myself to be so funny. “We both know you’re hardly servant material with that mark hanging over you, child. But you have made me curious, and I suppose Lindy won’t mind if I borrow you for a while. You can come inside, and bring your dinner with you.” She turned sharply and gestured me to follow. I took a stumbling step forward; at the threshold, she looked back and said, “You’ll have to leave your friends in the yard. I don’t allow outside magic in my house.”

                I looked down at the geckos now draped across my arms, unsure how to convey this – but they seemed to get the message, dropping back into the grass. The snake, too, unfurled from my ankle and the frogs disappeared into the night.

***

                The inside of the cottage was small, one room, with a bed in the corner and most of the space taken up by a massive table – but everything in it gleamed. It looked like it had all been swept moments ago. And cabinets lined the walls, more finely carved than any I’d ever seen.

                The witch opened one and unfolded a small carpet, which she dropped in front of the fire. Waving me over, she said, “Sleep. Eat your vegetables. We’ll discuss terms in the morning.” Then she retreated to the bed, drawing an embroidered curtain around it, seemingly from the air and vanishing from view.

                I ate what I’d taken, still dirty from the ground, and spread the carpet before the fire. I was warmer than I’d been in days, but it took me hours to fall asleep.

                In the morning, I woke to a pot of porridge cooking on the fire and a bowl sitting near my head. I looked around, but the witch was nowhere in sight. I spooned up the porridge and found her outside.

                The front of the house had an even more expansive garden, but this one was planted with flowers and very strange-looking herbs. Shaded by the trees was a shallow pool, ringed with stone. The witch was seated at a small table tucked under the eaves. When she saw me, she pointed to the second chair. I sat.

                “How did you sleep?” she asked.

                “Very well, thank you,” I said. “I feel so much better.” Then I stopped and touched my hand to my mouth, going cross-eyed looking at it. But there was nothing there.

                “Yes,” she said, “The ward extends to the front yard. I need to keep the plants from getting contaminated. I wouldn’t overuse it, though. Magic suppression spells tend to make one feel pretty ill after a while.”

                I ate my breakfast in silence.

                “So,” she said. “Terms.”

                I put the last spoonful in my mouth and looked up expectantly.

                “As long as you work, you can stay. Don’t touch anything in the house you haven’t been told to.”

                I waited.

                “That’s it?” I asked after a moment.

                She nodded.

                “Why?”

                “ _You’re_ certainly emboldened by a good night’s sleep. I’m in a generous mood. And I owe you maidens a debt.” She stood up and pointed at a path into the forest. “Go fetch some water from the well and start on the dishes.”

                I stood up as well, but before I moved to go, she asked, “What’s your name?”

                This was one of this witch things we had all been warned about. “What happens if I tell you?” I hedged.

                “Nothing.”

                I didn’t speak.

                She sighed. “Giving a name opens a vulnerability. But the fact that you’ve been cursed by my sister is a much wider door to your soul.”

                That seemed to make sense. “I’m Violet.”

                She smiled. “Nice to meet you, Violet. I’m Ash.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming in chapter three (because I've already written some of it): consequences, more witches, and a glimpse of what Rana's been up to.


	3. The Cottage

                The routine was simple enough to grasp. I helped with the cooking and the dishes and, most of all, the two large gardens. I spent the majority of my time watering and weeding.

                Ash wasn’t usually as magnanimous as she’d been the first morning. Most days she barely spoke to me other than to direct me where to weed next. And she hated the creatures that followed me around. In addition to the frogs, I’d added several more lizards, toads, and another tiny snake to my entourage since I’d been there, and they all stuck around now. Once, when we were both in the backyard and I stood up to cross the garden, there was a noticeable rustle in the foliage as they all moved with me.

                “Why _do_ they all do that?” I asked aloud.

                Ash snorted. “Halfling magic is unpredictable. Be grateful they haven’t started nesting in your hair.”

                I didn’t ask any more questions about magic after that.

                A few weeks into my time there, she sent me inside to fetch her a mortar and pestle from the house. She was working with one of the strange-smelling herbs on the front table.

                “First cabinet on the right side of the door,” she said.

                I opened the cabinet and found the mortar and pestle quickly enough. But when I grabbed it, what looked to be golden egg was dislodged from the place next to it and rolled away, landing on the shelf below with a solid thump.

                I cursed under my breath. It was down among all kinds of bottles and strange instruments I had no place for. I reached to take it and put it back, but as my fingers brushed the egg, my wrist bumped one of the bottles next to it. Both spots sent white-hot agony spiking through my arm. I screamed and jerked my hand back, whacking it on the underside of the shelf, as I was enfolded in a blinding light and deposited on my back in the front yard.

                Ash was towering over me, eyes blazing. “You _stupid girl_ ,” she hissed. “I told you not to touch anything.”

                “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the egg fell and I was just trying to put it back,” I gasped, disoriented. I tried to scramble myself up, but when I put weight on my right hand it scorched again. I yelped and held it against my chest as I sat up.

                “Stop crying, it’s just a short teleportation,” Ash snapped, but then she looked closer and her eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?”

                I looked at my hand. My fingertips and the spot on my wrist were blistered red. “Your spell burned me,” I said, through tears.

                “Give it here,” she said. I glared.

                “Oh, for god’s sake. I’m not going to hurt you. Give. It. Here.”

                I held out the hand.

                She cradled it in her palm and looked at the marks. She huffed. “I hate halfling magic. What the hell kind of curse did my sister give you?” She stomped off into the house and returned with the mortar and pestle I’d left behind, along with some strips of cloth. Still muttering to herself, she plucked a pod of some kind from the garden and returned to crouch next to me.

                While she was mashing the pod into a pulp and bandaging my burns with it, I noticed a line of my creatures along the edge of where the magical boundary met the woods. They looked like they were straining against it. Ash followed my gaze and sighed again.

                “You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” she grumbled.

                “Must be some debt you owe,” I said. She looked at my sharply.

                “What was it?” I continued.

                “I told my sister Tamarack about something and the punishment came down on an infant,” she said. “Who became a young woman like yourself and is still paying the price.” She tied a knot firmly around my wrist and stood up.

                I followed, much more gingerly. “So, how did my curse change your spell?”

                I went to pick up the mortar and pestle for cleaning, but she shooed my hand away. “If a human thief interferes with my belongings, it’s a momentary shock and they’re taken back outside, with memory of the pain but no lasting damage to show for it. You’re over-sensitized because of your curse, that’s all.”

                “What happens if another witch touches your stuff?”

                “She wouldn’t.” Ash smirked. “But if she tried, there would be much greater consequences than your burns.”

                “Do all people who get cursed become halflings?”

                “You’re all _called_ halflings, by definition,” she snapped. “It’s a title, not an accomplishment. But Lindy has been known to overdo it. No more questions. I’m meant to be working.”

***

                I had never known there was a term for people who had been witch-marked. Halfling. I liked the sound of it; it made me feel less burdened. For the first time in a while, I wondered what my sister was up to.

                And I thought about how she had controlled the size and worth of the jewels, the last time I had seen her. Could I do something like that?

                I started murmuring to myself in the back garden when Ash wasn’t around. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out how to have any say over what my words conjured – but the creatures seemed to like my talking. They liked it even more when I hummed at them.

                Suddenly the height of summer was upon us. One day, when both Ash and I were working on the potato bugs – easily a two-person job – the clear blue sky was broken apart by a loud crack.

                I started and looked around wildly. It sounded for all the world like a lightning bolt, but there was nothing to be seen. Before I could ask, there came another one.

                Ash flinched and then rolled her eyes as she stood up. Briskly wiping her hands off, she said, “You can watch, but do try not to intrude.”

                “What?”             

                But she was already moving, around to the front of the house. I followed, peering around the corner of the house to the front yard.

                Two women were standing just outside the ward boundary, bickering at each other. From where I was, I could only see the face of one of them, the one who was slightly taller. Black hair rippled down her back, and everything about her seemed sharpened – a pointed chin, chiseled cheekbones, pale skin that almost glowed, and eyelashes so dine and dark I could see them flutter from where I hid. She was beautiful, but it was an unearthly kind of beauty, like a fine painting come to life.

                “It’s irresponsible,” she was saying to the other woman. “Shaping the fate of a kingdom because of a servant girl’s sad songs.” It was obviously meant to be a reprimand, but her voice was relaxed, almost slow.

                “You’re just mad because you wanted him for your girl,” the other woman said plaintively.

                The dark-haired one scoffed. “Please. That girl’s not marrying anybody.”

                “If you’re both done,” Ash cut in, leaning on her front door, “How many times have I asked you both not to bring this nonsense to my yard?”

                “Ash.” The tall one sniffed. “I can’t believe you helped her.”

                “Only with the shoes.”

                “You _know_ I can’t get spells to stick to material objects, and they _had_ to last,” the other one whined. She turned to face Ash, and I gasped in spite of myself. It was my witch – the same flawless face as last I’d seen her, standing beside the well; the same rose-gold curls. Only this time, she was pouting.

                My whole skin seemed to pulse at the recognition.

                “Look,” Ash was saying, “stop needling her about it, it’s not a big deal. And Linden, quit acting like such a baby and letting her wind you up.”

                “She _is_ the baby,” the dark-haired one muttered, but Linden wasn’t listening. “Ash,” she said, “who’s here?”

                I stared in another direction, trying to shrink myself against the wall, but then I felt a cold tug at my guts and I took a step forward around the corner. Ash’s wards were closing in around me and dragging at my skin, but the pull of foreign magic seemed to embed itself in the base of my spine and I was compelled to take another step.

                I looked up to see the gaze of the dark-haired sister meeting mine, cutting through me with a flat inquisitiveness as I kept walking.

                “Tamarack. Knock it off,” Ash said. She was still leaning on her door, arms folded, but her tone was a warning and the spell dropped away. I massaged my stomach in relief.

                “It’s not like you to take a halfling,” Tamarack said. “You haven’t bothered with humans since that stunt with the mirror.”

                Ash shrugged, her shoulders stiff. “I didn’t take anyone. She showed up. Lindy’s doing.”

                Linden squealed. “NOW I remember you! The one I punished for insincerity. How are you liking your curse?”

                “It could be worse,” I said. “I’m making do.”

                “You are an interesting one, aren’t you,” Tamarack said, eyes still on me. “Why’s she special, Ash?”

                “She’s just grabbed onto it particularly hard,” Ash said. “Some of them do, you know.”

                A small smile played around Tamarack’s mouth. “I do know,” she said.

                Linden suddenly clapped her hands together. “Do you want to see what your sister’s doing right now?”

                I glanced at Ash, half expecting her to step in, but she looked blankly ahead. “Yes,” I told Linden.

                “Come here, then.” She strode to the small pool set in the front of the yard, which I’d never yet seen Ash use. It was just beyond the ward’s barrier, and as I crossed it I felt the familiar tension ease from my chest. Ash had been right, it did begin to make me queasy.

                Linden jerked me by the arm to stand looking down into the pool. “Open your mouth,” she said.

                “Wha-“ but even as I spoke, she held my chin with a finger and formed a fist in front of my opened lips. I felt a sharp yank suddenly, and a tearing, like someone had taken a fishhook to my lungs. I coughed.

                “Good girl.” Linden opened her first, which held nothing less than a spark of blue light. When I looked at her in confusion, she said, “The only way to seek someone is with a scrap of something unique to them. Skin, hair, blood. But fortunately, you and your sister share this very special curse.” She turned over her hand and let the light fall into the water, which rippled once and then clouded over.

                When it cleared I was looking at my sister. I leaned so far over the water I wobbled. Someone took my shoulder to steady me. Ash, I realized, who had come up behind me without my noticing.

                Rana was sitting in a small room, plain. She was scribbling something fiercely on a piece of paper. When she finished, she held it up to the light and squinted as she read it over. Then, grinning, she signed it. I had no idea when she’d learned to write that well.

                As she left the room, the image dissolved, but we found her again arguing with the old merchant over the same document. We couldn’t hear them speak, but it looked heated. I watched as my sister spoke to him until he sighed and signed the paper – and only then did I realize nothing had come from her mouth the whole time.

                After the merchant signed, his son did too. As the old man glowered and left the room, Rana embraced the son and spoke a single word into his ear. A large emerald fell and became entangled in his hair.

                “That’s incredible,” Ash whispered.

                We followed my sister as she went out into a street – with a shock, I realized this was a city I did not know – and wrapped herself in a fur-lined cape, and boarded a carriage with the merchant’s son.

                The pool cleared. I looked at Ash, who was still staring. “Quite a family you’ve found, Lindy,” she said at last. “That level of control-“

                Linden laughed, high and sharp, but she was frowning. “Anyway, we came to tell you something, didn’t we, Tam?”

                “There’s been a convening called tonight,” Tamarack said from Linden’s other side. I jumped, but no one paid any attention. Tamarack held out a small lock of hair, neatly tied together. “Scry mine, before we go.”

                Linden moved to take it, but Tamarack moved her hand away. “I need something more medium term, dear. Ash, three days from now, if you please.”

                “This is pointless,” Ash grumbled, but she dropped the hair into the pool regardless.

                This time, the scene that greeted us was still, not a hint of movement. We were looking at a castle room, I supposed; all fine drapings and furniture set against rough stone. Curled up in a large four-poster bed, a young woman slept. Her blonde hair was flung across the pillow and her mouth was hanging open, but her knees were tucked up against her chest and her hands were folded under her chin like she’d been posed. Or made of stone.

                If you looked closely, you could see her chest rise and fall, but no hint of a dream crossed her face, and the coverlet around her was thick with dust.

                “Look,” Ash said, “three days from now she’ll be right where she’s supposed to be, just in time for you to do whatever awful thing you’re planning to her and some young man. Can we get going, please?”

                “The boy is irrelevant,” Tamarack said, but she stepped away from the pool. The others followed; Ash took my arm and pointed her chin towards the house.

                “Mind the chores while I’m gone,” she said. “These things rarely last more than a couple days. Don’t touch anything.”

                I nodded.

                The three of them stood at the edge of the woods. “Western grove,” Linden said to Ash. “That bitch Maple is being a problem again-“ and with a loud boom, she popped out of existence.

                Ash followed next, her body blinking in and out a few times before vanishing. And Tamarack last, fading into the trees with such agonizing slowness. I thought about the girl in the castle and tried not to meet her eyes.


	4. The Castle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dislike a solid percentage of the dialogue in this chapter but I've been sitting on it too long I needed to post it and move on lol.

And so I was alone in the witch’s house.

                For the first two days, I spent all my time in the back garden, chattering to my scaled retinue. When I was very bored, I sat very quietly and tried to feel for the curse inside of me, thinking that I could draw it out like Linden had. But while the meditation was nice, I came up empty. Other times I thought about Rana, practicing our silent language for the first time since I’d left.

                I did not think about my mother.

                I discovered that I hated sleeping in the cottage alone. I could never be sure it was empty. On the first night, I didn’t sleep at all because the wind whistling in the chimney almost sounded like voices. Before sleeping the second night, I cleaned the whole house and swept into the corners, even though it was already as spotless as it had always been.

                On the third night, when I’d woken up yet again from a faint bump or hiss or rustle, I took a candle and felt along the walls, determined to reassure myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. I had gotten to the corner with Ash’s bed when I ran into something that wasn’t there.

                Not something solid – rather, something like a bubble of air. When I put my arm there, I had the disconcerting feeling that it was hidden, halfway to somewhere else, even though I could still see it. It felt almost like when I had been burned and transported outside the cabin, but suspended in time.

                I set the candle on the floor and felt around with both hands, finding the edges of the strange bubble. It was a long oval shape, really, and the surface between the edges was tense, like a wound stitched together. When I put my hand through, I seemed to be blocked from going all the way. All the way _where_ , I couldn’t say.

                I hadn’t been burned yet, so even as I questioned that this was anything to be messed with, I didn’t think anything bad would happen. Maybe I didn’t think at all. I was so lonely.

                I grasped at the edges of the seam and ripped them apart.

                Immediately, I felt a rush of air hit me in the face, and then a roll of fabric fell out of nowhere and hit the ground. Ash’s curtain, the one she pulled from the air each night. I had barely an instant to marvel over that, though, because next an ear-scorching shriek split the air.

                I stumbled back from the portal as it repeated and echoed around the cabin. I was already halfway to the door when a small dark form burst from the place I’d been standing and hurled itself at me, landing with a hideous weight on my chest.

                I screamed and tried to pry the thing off with my hands. It felt leathery, and dense, and with no shape I could place. I could feel no teeth, but still I had the sickening sense that it was trying to meld _into_ me, and that I had to get away. With a flush of strength, I managed to get my hands under it and fling it from me; it ricocheted off one of the cabinets and howled again.

                I fumbled from the doorknob and flung myself outside, managing to keep my footing on the grass. Ash’s voice was echoing in my head, calling me all sorts of stupid for letting something like that loose. I didn’t have the timing or the presence of mind to close the door against the menace, so it followed me outside.

                I ran without thought to where I was going, or where I might end up. I know I felt the ward snap off of me when I reached the boundary, and I was dimly aware of my creatures rushing alongside me, some even making it to my feet before I’d made it two strides past the border.

                The dark thing shrieked again, and in spite of myself I turned back to look. It was almost upon me, so I didn’t stop running – and it was while I was looking that I fell into the scrying pool.

                What happened was that one of my feet hit the edge perfectly, and I tipped forward, my head still facing behind me. I was moving too fast to stop, so by the time I’d turned back to look where I was going there was no changing course.

                In the split second before I hit, I braced myself for the impact of my pursuer on my exposed back as much as my face on the bottom of the pool. And as I fell, I was vaguely aware of what felt like several tiny bodies leaping to land on the backs of my legs and shoulders and hair.

                But I didn’t hit the bottom of the pool. I felt my face break the surface of the water, and the fluids rush into my eyes and nose and mouth, but then I kept falling.

                _That’s weird_ , I thought. Then I blacked out.

***

                It’s important that I had never left my home village before the curse. A few dirt roads, not even busy enough to merit cobblestone, and endless forest were all I’d known. So when I woke up with my cheek pressed against stone, I barely even knew to place it as ground. It took what felt like many long minutes to come back into my body enough to open my eyes and sit up.

                I was in a small courtyard, with a gate open to the forest in one wall and a door ajar in the opposite. I blinked several times and looked around, concentrating on the solid stone beneath me as reassurance that I wasn’t dreaming. It was all utterly still.

                When I stood up, I realized I had brought about half my creatures with me through the pool, and they still clung to my skin. They resettled themselves as I started walking, but didn’t look to be leaving me anytime soon. Truth be told, I was glad for the company.

                “Well, friends, looks like we’re on new ground once again,” I said aloud, just to hear something. I wrapped the new snake around my wrist. I eschewed the gate – I’d had my fill of forest – and headed to the inner door.

                It led to another courtyard, one that was larger, and whose main feature was a small enclosed space, some kind of temporary stable, where a horse stood. I started when I saw it, but it was definitely alive, twitching and flicking an ear every so often.

                I didn’t have much experience with horses, but I approached this one cautiously, thinking maybe that it could tell me something about the kinds of people I could expect to find here. But as I got closer, and shifted to peer around the horse, I yelped and nearly leapt back.

                A young man – a boy, really – was seated on a stool in the corner of the stable. Not expecting to see any people before I’d even got my bearings, I put my hands up, frantically thinking of a cover story for why I was wandering in this strange castle. It was then that I looked up and observed that it was, in fact, a castle, two towers arcing in the sky over me.

                I looked back at the boy, waiting for him to notice me, but he hadn’t moved. I frowned, and realized he was slumped over – but he didn’t look dead, his flesh was maybe a bit pale but unblemished, his uniform clean. I tiptoed closer and was only a couple feet away when I saw that his chest was rising and falling, slowly, unperturbed by my approach.

                I had to be right up next to him to hear the snoring. He didn’t wake up when I poked at him, either.

                I spun away from him, scared almost out of my mind, and walked briskly further into the castle almost without thinking. I wasn’t afraid of running into any people anymore. I wanted to find someone who could tell me what was going on.

                But as I went further inside, through a plethora of rooms, all I found was more sleep. And dust.

                It was when I found the kitchen, where several cooks and serving maids had their heads bent over in what looked like very peaceful unnatural rest, that I had to give up hoping that anything normal was going on.

                I thought about going back out, making for the woods, maybe even looting one of the nice rooms as I went. But I was keenly aware that I’d only survived the first time because I’d been lucky to stumble upon Ash’s home. At least the castle was shelter; at least I still had the chance of finding someone awake if I kept going.

                So I set out to explore the castle. I retraced my steps through the rooms on the bottom floor, making sure I’d got them all, and then I headed upwards. Everywhere I went, there were people who seemed to have fallen asleep in the middle of their everyday tasks, just nodded off apparently with no concern for the rest of the world. Beneath the dust, I could tell that it was a nice place, outfitted with the kinds of furniture and fabrics I’d never bothered to imagine.

                As I went, I kept talking to myself, needing some sound to echo in the corners. And besides, I liked the company. The creatures even seemed to relax a bit, dropping off of my clothes to just hop, slither, and skitter along in my wake.

                I was on the fourth floor up when I discovered the tower door. At least, I assumed that was it, because the wall curved instead of meeting at a clean corner like the other floors.

                It was open.

                It’s funny that I hadn’t noticed the footprints on the floor before then. I mean, I’d been walking along with a small train of tiny animals, kicking enough dust of my own. But first I saw that the tower door’s handle was clean, and then I looked inside and saw the clear footprints marked in the dust on each stair tread.

                Somehow, the sight of the footprints in this untouched place unnerved me more than the sleeping court. I supposed they went with the horse, but I didn’t like the thought that someone else awake had been in the space with me. So before I followed them up, I whispered to my creatures, and they all gathered themselves on my body again. Mostly nestling in my hair and hiding in my clothes. I didn’t want to have any underfoot if I had to run again.

***

                The stairs went up and up, and I went as silently as I could. They terminated at another door, which was also open. I hesitated for a moment just beyond the threshold, but I needn’t have worried about my footsteps making any noise, because just then the sound of coughing was echoing out of the door and around the whole top of the tower.

                “Are you alright?” I heard a voice say, one that sounded like it was not having any trouble breathing.

                In response, the hacking just seemed to go on.

                I struggled with myself for a brief instant, but eventually my need to see another awake human beat out my fear of their reaction to an intruder. I walked confidently through the door, but then stopped dead in my tracks. To my surprise, the room was actually familiar.

                “You’re Tamarack’s princess,” I said, stupidly. I’d gotten used to talking to myself, and I’d almost forgotten how normal people would react to the curse when a frog dropped from my lips.

                The princess was sitting on her bed, the bed I’d seen in the pool, her hair and bedsheets a mess, pressed up against the wall and clutching her chest as she coughed. She stared at me as she gradually regained her breath.

                At her bedside was a man. His armor gleamed, and he even wore a thin circlet of gold on his brow. I looked at the princess with her legs tangled in the sheets, and my eyes narrowed; it looked as though she’d scooted rather quickly backwards away from him.

                The man was reacting rather violently to my speech. Well, he took a step towards me with a hand on his sword, and said, “begon, witch!” in a declarative tone.

                I put my hands up, but really I had no idea what to do. “I’m not a witch,” I said, “I’m a halfling.” Snake, this time.

                My words apparently weren’t convincing, or maybe he didn’t want to be convinced, because he drew his sword. “Leave my princess alone, or I’ll run you through,” he commanded.

                I suddenly felt white-hot angry that he would try and order me away like that, back into the doomed, silent castle. Over his shoulder, the princess had stopped coughing and was shaking her head almost imperceptibly.

                 “NO,” I spat at him.

                To my surprise, he turned white and dropped his sword, marking a wide path around me as he ran out the door.

                I stared after him, utterly confused, until I felt a prickling on my arms. I looked down and realized that all the creatures hidden in the folds of my sleeves had come out to stand at attention along my shoulders and down my arms. When I reached my hand up, I found the several snakes hidden in my hair had uncoiled and gone fully upright. And then I remembered the energy that surged through me when I shouted, that had made all my creatures spring up in the direction of the young man. No wonder he was scared; I must have looked like a demon, summoning the lowest creatures of the forest to encase me all at once.

                I heard a thump and looked over to see that the princess had fallen out of the bed.

                “Do you need any help?” I asked.

                She grimaced. “My legs don’t seem to be working yet.” She straightened them out and began to rub her thighs vigorously. Then she made eye contact with me. “Did Lady Tamara send you?”

                “Who?”

                “My fairy godmother that wasn’t invited. The reason I’m even here.”

                “You mean Tamarack? No, I said I wasn’t a witch.”

                She raised her eyebrows. “And I’m supposed to believe you?”

                “I’m cursed!”

                She grinned, and her face suddenly shone. “Birds of a feather flock to my tower, then. I guess I will take a hand, if you don’t mind.”

                I gripped her elbows and she leaned on my forearms as she stood up. Then she let out a breath of air. “Oof. Sleeping for a hundred years doesn’t wear off easily. I’m Thorn.”

                “Violet.”

                “So why’re you in my bedroom?”

                “It’s a long story,” I said.

                She winced her way over to the window and gazed out. Then she laughed. “Look, Violet, there he goes!”

                I followed her and saw a man on horseback racing out of the castle gates – the gate I’d seen when I got here, which meant that must have been his horse.

                “I’m sorry,” I said, “for scaring him off.”

                She snorted. “Don’t be. If I’d known it was going to be that easy I would’ve tried to pick some magic myself before I turned sixteen.”

                Looking out the window, something else caught my eye. An unruly hedge grew around the castle, so thick I’d first taken it for a short wall. It barely gapped where the prince had fled – like it had been cut open.

                Thorn left me to go rummage in a dusty wardrobe. “I’d take a bath, but I suppose we’ll have to start walking anyway. Unless you’ve got some magic way of getting out of here. Or – my parents used to say they would make sure a sentry was waiting for me, but I never thought that would work.”

                “Uh,” I said, “won’t the others be waking up soon?”

                She froze. “What others?”

                “The castle is full of sleeping people. I thought that was part of your curse.” I cringed every time something fell from my mouth, as I’d done this whole time. But she didn’t pay any attention to them. Dropping the dress she’d been holding, she headed to the door. “Show me where they are.”

                “They’re all over,” I said.

                She opened the door, but then looked back at me. “Will you come with me?”

***

                I followed Thorn down the stairs. It seemed no less silent than before.

                “It was evening,” she said, speaking only once. “I had gone to bed early. We ate in the library that night, the three of us. They’re probably still there.”

                We went down one floor and down some hallways I barely even remembered from my earlier trek. No one seemed to have woken up yet. When we got to a heavy door, Thorn glanced at me. “Do you think you could put the, uh, entourage away?”

                I whispered at my creatures and they retreated up my legs again.

                Thorn whistled and then looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t quite see that before with that guy in the way.”

                I smiled.

                Inside the library, two people were sitting in armchairs in front of a dead fire and more books than I knew existed. They stirred as we entered the room, and Thorn touched one cheek, then the other. “Mom? Dad?”

                When she touched them, they spluttered to life. Coughing like she had, but less violently. Then their gaze fixed on her, and both parents smiled.

                “Thorn, baby,” her mother said. “You’re okay.”

                “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I’m okay. It’s over.”

                “I don’t even remember what happened,” her father put in. “Were we asleep?”

                “Yes,” Thorn said. “I don’t know what happened. No one ever told me that would happen.”

                Her mother was now looking around. “Where’s the prince?”

                Thorn looked at the ground. “He…ran off after I woke up.” She glanced at me, where I stood awkwardly at the door. Her parents stared at me in bewilderment. I didn’t want to say anything.

                “This is Violet,” Thorn said. “She showed up after I woke up. But that prince was a coward. We don’t need him.”

                “Thorn!” said her father, even as her mother said, “You’ll have to get him back. You know how this is supposed to work. We do need him.”

                “I don’t!”

                Her father drew a breath. “This isn’t up for discussion.”

                Thorn covered her face in her hands, letting out a muffled shriek. “It’s been a hundred years, but nothing’s changed!”

                Her mother stood up and moved toward her. “Thorn-“

                “The curse is broken! I don’t want him!”

                “It’s not just about the curse,” her father said.

                Thorn threw up her hands. “You’re not listening to me!”

                Her parents stopped. I could just barely see the shockwave that rippled out from Thorn’s mouth and hands at them. They froze where they were and then they slumped, falling back asleep.

                Thorn was suddenly gripping my arm, looking wildly around. “Violet? Did you do that?”

                “I keep telling you I’m not – no. I think you did.”

                She looked scared. “I don’t want to be in here anymore.”

                “We don’t have to be.”

***

                Thorn continued winding her way through her castle, and following in her wake I felt like some kind of scaled sentinel.

                Some of the people twitched or dreamed louder as she passed, but for the most part she avoided them, and didn’t touch anyone else.

                We stopped only once. Thorn lingered on an intricate double doorway, and when I asked what was inside, she pushed the doors open without a word.

                Two wooden thrones commanded the end of a long hall, other seats and benches half-encircled behind them. Even empty and blanketed in dust, they were imposing. I felt no magic, but something powerful and old seemed to emanate from the dais, holding this room at an even stiller silence than the rest of the castle.

                Thorn walked toward her parents’ thrones slowly, as if dazed, and then burst into great heaving sobs, folding her face into her hands and swaying on her feet.

                “Hey, I’m sure you can work it out, it’ll be okay,” I said, resting my hand on her shoulder as lightly as I dared. I had no idea if it would be okay.

                She sniffed and wiped her face. “It’s not that. What if I can’t wake them back up? What if I put them to sleep forever?”

                “I assure you, my dear,” a cold voice said from behind us, “you most certainly did not.”


	5. The Tower

Tamarack stood behind us in the doorway, but it took me a minute to recognize her. Her features were the same, but her black hair was piled on top of her head and adorned with glittering combs. And where before she'd had very nondescript clothes, now she was draped in a flowering dark robe that swept to the floor. Strangest of all, one outstretched hand held a tapered, short staff. 

Tamarack was frightening the first time I met her, but standing before the princess she'd cursed in all this finery, she took on another dimension entirely. 

Thorn had jumped as if electrified, and now when she spoke her voice shook. "Lady Tamara," she said. "I thought it was over."

But Tamarack wasn't paying any attention to her. She was staring at me, and again I felt an invisible hook dragging me towards her. Thorn followed me until we were all standing within a couple feet of each other. 

"Well, little halfling," Tamarack said to me, "you keep turning up in the strangest places."

"I fell through the scrying pond."

The witch laughed, high and clear. "So it was you who freed Ash's demon. She was so distracted at the end of our conclave. It serves her right for bringing you in and letting you nourish your malformed gift."

"Excuse me," Thorn said. "Why did you come back?"

Tamarack gave her a look of pure disdain. "If you thought it was over when you went to sleep, you're more foolish than I thought."

"But you said-"

"When I am owed something, I follow through. Your majority belongs to me, and those meddling three don't get to change that." Tamarack cast a sweeping gaze over the room. "And they don't seem to have followed through, have they? What happened to true love's defender?"

Thorn set her jaw. "Why are my parents still alive then? They did something. Were we even asleep for the full hundred years?"

"Oh, don't worry. You were. And whatever's happened to this castle, it wasn't by one of my own. something else came to mess with it, undoubtedly."

"Halfling magic," I said.

Tamarack scoffed, but I kept going. The truth seemed to materialize in my mind as I spoke it aloud. "It takes time to grow, right? She lived with that curse her whole life, and when it hit, she didn't want  to be alone, so she put everyone else to sleep with her." The strength of what I was saying tore my attention from Tamarack and I turned to Thorn. 

"She's just a witch," I told her. "She's not all-powerful."

"She's a fairy," Thorn said, but her eyes were shining anew.

"Child," Tamarack said to me, "power is power, and there are some places, like this one, that still respect those of us who have it. In this country, they even make us godparents for their children. But it doesn't matter what you call us. What matters is that I get what I'm owed, and that is reparations for my slight at the hand of her parents. Now, princess," and she twitched her hand - Thorn's face snapped to meet hers - "since you've somehow managed to drive off your prince, I have some ideas for how we can finish this story."

"It was me that drove him off," I responded.

"I think you should stop talking, halfling," Tamarack barked. She brandished her staff, and my lips sealed shut, glued together as though I'd never spoken a word. Struggle as much as I could, I could not pry them apart. 

Thorn screamed, but Tamarack shushed her. "Hold out your hand."

Thorn complied, and on her index finger, a small spurt of blood appeared, as if from the prick of a needle.

"So," Tamarack began, "You changed the deal. My payment was supposed to wrench you from your parents forever, whether by death or sleep. Even that insulting intervention only made it worse, prolonging your life so that I could come claim it in the end. But here we are, and, as you said, it's like no time has passed for you. So I think I have a new plan."

The other four fingers on Thorn's hand began bleeding.

"It's not enough to end it now," Tamarack continued. "I think more of your time is due to me. But this time you'll be awake - awake, and separated from your family by only a wall. Come."

She made us follow her as we wound up through the dead castle again, up and up, into the other tower. It was larger than the one where Thorn had slept. She bid us stand in an interior room with two doors, and slammed the one to the stairs below shut. 

"There," she said. "Here is where you get to spend the rest of your days. Locked away inside your own castle." She turned a hand and the door briefly flickered and became transparent. "Maybe sometimes they'll be able to glimpse you, and maybe sometimes you'll be able to see them, but you'll never be able to count on it, and they'll never be able to hear you."

"Just kill me," Thorn said flatly. "You're going to do it eventually."

Tamarack smiled. "Not yet." She turned to the door and began weaving what I could only assume was some kind of ward in the air. 

Thorn looked at me. "Violet, I hope you're right about this," she muttered, and then slapped her bleeding hand over my mouth.

As the witch had walked and talked, I'd had words and rage bubbling up inside me, and when Thorn's blood touched my lips, my curse seemed to reawaken and ignite. It surged through me; I felt them tear as I did it, but I ripped my lips apart, and I directed all of my anger at Tamarack, and I screamed. 

A cascade of lizards and snakes and toads flew at her and suddenly half her face was covered in my creations. As she tried to pry them away, Thorn grabbed my hand and pulled me into the other room, closing the door behind us. 

This was a smaller room, rounder. I was dismayed to see that, though there was a large window, there was no other door. I peered out the window; it was a straight, long drop down to the moat below. 

Thorn, wild-eyed, her back to the door, was looking at me. "Now what?"

I heard Tamarack laughing and calling taunts from the other room. I could only hope that she, purveyor of slow magic and cold revenge that she was, would take her time in getting to us. Or maybe she was busy vanishing lizards still. 

I looked out the window again. I don't remember exactly how I came up with my mad idea. I just remember thinking, after all of this, there was no way I was not finding a way out of that room. And, feeling Linden's invigorated curse moving within me, and with Thorn's blood still tingling on my lips, I thought back to how I'd gotten to this castle in the first place. 

I found Thorn's eye's across the room. She looked so terrified, but more awake than she'd been the whole time.

"Do you trust me?"

Her gaze never wavered. "Yes."

"Then I think I have a way out of here." And with that, I bent over and coughed as if my life depended on it. 

I hacked and wheezed until my chest ached, concentrating as hard as I could. Finally, I jabbed the back of my throat, and as I heaved, I caught a little glowing blue light in my palm. 

I held out my other hand to Thorn, who was staring at me. "What is that?" she asked, crossing to join me by the window.

"It's a spark of my curse," I said, "and I think it can get us out of here."

I climbed onto the windowsill, my legs hanging over the edge, my hands and elbows bracing me in place. Thorn took her place next to me, but she no longer seemed trusting. "This is crazy."

I could only shrug. "I came here through water. Water should get us away."

She nodded slowly. The door banged and we both jumped. 

"I think," I said, "you need to hold on to me."

Without hesitation, Thorn settled herself in my lap, legs straddling my waist and face buried in my neck.

"Are you ready?" I asked.

"Yes."

I held out my hand and dropped the spark. It fell straight down, drawn to the water, and the moat rippled where it touched. I peered over Thorn's shoulder. Was that a city street solidifying on the surface?

If it wasn't, it was too late to change my mind. I took a deep breath, gripped Thorn's back, and pushed us off from the window.

For a single heart-stopping moment, when we hit the water, I thought it hadn't worked. The impact stung this time, reflecting through my body, and I thought I heard Thorn gasp as it knocked the wind out of both of us. But we didn't reach the bottom of the moat, nor did we inhale water, and as the familiar darkness took me I almost sighed in relief. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit short, but I wanted to close the chapter on this segment of the story.


	6. The Town

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No idea what most of this chapter even is...but other news: I think this whole thing will clock in at 8 chapters, with the final confrontation next time and an epilogue of sorts to close out.

Unlike my first trip through water, I felt us hit the ground hard. And my heart began violently banging against my ribs. I had to breathe in and out several times before I could hear anything besides it.

Beneath me, Thorn whimpered; I let go and scrabbled at when felt like cobblestone. Then I heard a familiar voice say “Violet?”

                I opened my eyes. Rana and her young man were staring down at me, my sister dressed in finery to match what I’d seen in Thorn’s closet. She was gaping, openly; the young man was similarly wordless but extended a hand to me. I took it and then pulled the still-winded Princess off of the ground.

                “You just appeared,” Rana choked out, “what’s happening?”

                “Ooh,” Thorn gasped, “You’re her opposite.” Indeed, Rana’s control seemed to be slipping in the face of our arrival and two gems had fallen as she spoke.

                “It’s a long story,” I said. “We didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

                “Maybe you need a bath and some clothes?” the man said, glancing and Thorn and then away again. I remembered that she was still wearing her nightgown, cobwebs in her hair.

                Rana seemed to snap into focus. “Yes, come inside,” she said. “We were just on our way out, but I didn’t much want to call on that family anyway.”

                They ushered us up solid steps and into a brick house, which stood a towering two stories and had windows edged in lace. A young, sharp-eyed woman was standing in the hall. “Please take these two to the Blue Room and run them some water,” Rana told her. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to us, “Our other guest room is occupied at the moment, so you’ll have to share.”

                “Oh, that’s fine,” Thorn said.

                The Blue Room turned out to come with a shiny washtub tucked behind a screen. I laid on the bed and stared at its embroidered canopy while Thorn bated a hundred years of dust off of her skin.

                The scrying pond had shown me that my sister had taken control of her own destiny, but seeing her here in a setting so utterly foreign to the one we’d grown up in was something I couldn’t think past. My weeks with Ash had felt like years, and I knew my sister had all the riches in the world at her command, but it was such a quick progression from noting to a home with servants and two extra bedrooms that I marveled.

                Thorn was brushing out her hair when the servant knocked and then entered again. “Pardon, Miss Violet,” she said, “but your sister would like to request you join her for a light supper, and wonders if your guest would prefer a tray in your room given the undoubtedly tiring travels.”

                For all her grace, my sister had never been a particularly subtle person. “Alright,” I said, looking at Thorn, who was shooing me away.

                I was led to a small sitting room, where the light supper turned out to consist of a tray of sandwiches, cold meat, and carefully cut fruit. Rana herself had changed into some kind of elaborate dressing gown.

                “So, Vi,” she said, as soon as I had sat across from her and we were alone, “what the fuck is going on?”

                “Ah,” I said, “it’s a long story.”

                She took a swig of her drink. Wine. “Do you mind if I use my hands? The control gets tiring.”

                Probably a good idea not to drop snakes on her nice furniture, too. I nodded and Rana leaned back on the lounge, flinging her feet up.

                _Well_ , I signed, _I left into the forest and lived with another witch-_

                That shocked her. “What? Who?”

                “Her name was Ash.” _She’s the sister of our witch. I learned to control the curse a little. But then I fell through a – looking pond, and I met that girl, who was also cursed, and we got nearly killed by her witch, and I didn’t know where else to go._

I was surprised that she didn’t ask how I’d found my way to her – but then I thought about how my heart had leapt in my chest when I landed and how I’d felt my curse thrumming through my veins since I’d been there, and I knew.

                _So_ , she signed at me, _now you’re alone._

_Not alone._

“You know what I mean,” she said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Did you come looking for money?”

                “What? No!”

                She rolled her eyes at me.

                “I’m serious, Rana. I didn’t come looking for your money. I’ve been too busy running for my life to think about money and Thorn certainly doesn’t need it.”

                She softened. “What’s her curse?”

                Ah. This complication. _She slept for a long time_ , I hedged.

                She stared at me for a moment, brow furrowed, and then sat straight upright. “That’s the sleeping princess? You kidnapped the sleeping princess?! Vi, that’s almost a hundred miles from here!”

                “I didn’t kidnap anyone, it was very mutual, and I said it was a life or death situation.”

                “I can’t believe this. I thought she was a myth. I heard about that prince setting off to wake her up but I thought that was some kind of ritual or something and I just hadn’t heard the full story yet.”

                I shrugged. “So tell me about you, then.”

                She sighed, but obliged anyway. _It’s not that interesting. I convinced him he could like me, and then I got the father to sign over his inheritance early. I send him a few jewels a month as a dowry. We’ll go to court soon, see if we can get a patron or something._

_And, is he an okay husband?_

She dismissed him with a flick of her hand. _He’s not important._

I squirmed back into the seat. Now that she seemed okay I didn’t know what else to say. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it was strange to find yourself uniquely tied to someone you had spent much of your life poised in opposition to.

                “You know I always resented you,” Rana said suddenly. “For not standing up to her for me.”

                “I know,” I muttered.

                “But I also owe you some gratitude,” she continued. Her face was set and steely, like she was fulfilling a duty. “If you hadn’t done what you did at the dinner, if I hadn’t been able to negotiate by myself, it would have taken me much longer to get rid of her.”

                “I wasn’t thinking about it like that.”

                “I know. But still.”

                “Where is she now?” I asked after a moment.

                “Our mother? Not in the woods anymore. Set herself up in the village. We don’t talk.”

                I didn’t know how to feel about that. Somehow I had a hard time picturing her outside the walls where we’d grown up. I suppose before the curse I always thought that I would bury her there, someday, and then fade away into the trees alone.

                “Anyway,” Rana said, “It’s strange to see you again, Vi, but we did it. We won.”

                She was holding one her diamonds between her fingers, I realized. Spinning it in the light as she did when they were new. I thought of Tamarack’s ivory face, carved with rage. Then I thought of Thorn’s palm soft against mine, her blood on my mouth.

                “Yeah,” I said. “We won.”

***

                Rana and I were still eating when we were startled by a crash from above. I jerked my head upwards.

                “That’s where the Blue Room is,” Rana said.

                I was halfway to the door when we heard the servant girl say “Miss, wait here-“

                The door slammed open and Thorn rushed to my side. She was wearing real clothes for the first time, but her hair was still damp as it whipped across her face. And she was wide-eyed, more terrified than I’d seen her yet.

                “The shadows,” she gasped. “The shadows were moving. I’m sorry,” turning to my sister, “I’m afraid I broke your dishes. The shadows moved and I got frightened and jumped out of the bed.”

                Through the open door, I saw the maid slumped against the wall. Sleeping.

                Then Rana, looking right past me, shrieked. I whirled around.

                In the corner of the room, just out of reach of the fire’s leaping light, the shadows were – growing. As I watched, as Thorn’s fingers dug into my hand, a patch of darkness grew on the walls, stretching almost languidly, wispy tendrils reaching out and shifting as they spread.

                “We need to leave, we need to run,” Thorn said. “Can you take us again, Violet?” I could feel her trembling.

                “I don’t know. I needed water for that, and a place to go.”

                “And leave me with _that_? No way, Princess.” Rana was standing behind us now, peering over my shoulder as the shadows grew larger, spreading further out from the corner onto the walls of the room.

                “She’s after me.”

                “We don’t know that for sure and I won’t have it in my house.” My sister’s initial fear was gone or subsumed. I was still watching the dark growth; as she spoke, it almost shimmered, and I had the impression of smoke rising off of the walls. The tendrils were more like arms, now, advancing and sucking light from each new inch gained.

                “But Tamarack’s _my-_ “ Thorn started. Rana hissed as the shadow suddenly leapt forward with a new energy. Nearly half the room was gone now and it had reached the ceiling.

                “Didn’t they teach you about names were you come from? Don’t say it again. Here.” Rana yanked both of us backwards away from the darkened walls, until we were standing right next to the shuddering fire. It was dimmer and quieter than it had been only moments before.

                “I don’t know how to fight this,” I said despairingly. A frog dropped onto my hand. What few other creatures I’d created since we’d arrived had gathered onto my wrists and shoulders, but I suddenly wished for the larger entourage I’d flung at Tamarack the last time we met.

                Thorn yelped and jumped against me as a tentacle suddenly darted out from the wall and towards her, barely reaching her face before fading away again. I imagined phantom laughter. Or I hoped I imagined it.

                “Violet,” my sister said, “do you know what I did, all those days I spent alone in the woods, when we were growing up?”

                Her voice was strangely even, but clipped and almost stilted. I wondered whether it was concealing terror or rage. “No,” I said. “What does this have to do-“

                “I did a lot of things,” she continued smoothly, sliding over my question. “I foraged food I didn’t have to divide with you. I climbed trees and stared into the sky, or talked to the squirrels and wished they could talk back at me. I kept doing it after the curse, you know, when I could get away. Go somewhere and speak as much as I wanted, leaving my jewels in the dirt.”

                I turned my head to stare at her. The lines around her mouth were drawn tightly, and I saw she was holding several flowers. As I watched, she plucked another from her lips.

                “There are a lot of dark places, in those woods,” Rana went on. “And when you’re alone, and you stumble into somewhere that doesn’t feel quite right, you have to work with what you’ve got. But fortunately I wasn’t used to having much.”

                She had a small bouquet now, and she gathered them all up in her fist. “You’re not the only one to learn something about magic, sister.”

                And then she flung the flowers atop the dying fire.

                There was a quiet _snap_ of a sound, the fire leapt up again, and white smoke poured into the room. When it passed over my face, it smelled not like smoke at all, but only fragrance, and where it met the approaching darkness, the darkness receded. It was beaten back to the corner, and when the smoke cleared, the shadows were still again.

                “It probably won’t hold your enemy for long, or work again,” Rana said. “But this would be time for you to vanish again, I think. Take the food.” She gestured at our abandoned supper. Thorn bent immediately and began wrapping it in napkins and stuffing them into her new pockets.

                “I don’t-“ I started to say, but then I thought. Rana’s talk about the woods had made me remember where all of this had begun. _Water and a place to go_. It was risky, but – well, no riskier than jumping off a tower.

                “Alright,” I said. “I need something from you, though.”

***

                Only a few minutes later, when Thorn had awoken the maidservant she’d hastily put to sleep and Rana had gathered us each a cloak for the elements, we got in position. Thorn stood behind me, arms wrapped around me and hands latched over my stomach, her face pressed into my hair. Rana faced me, and when I nodded, she took my hands.

                “Just think about it, hard as you can,” I said, and closed my eyes.

                At first, all I felt was a slight tingling in my wrists where her fingertips brushed me, but as I concentrated on the curse I could feel roiling in my chest, my palms began to heat. And then all of a sudden our joined hands began to burn as I felt the weight of my sister’s own curse on them, as though it could break through my skin at a moment’s notice.

                I tried to ignore the discomfort and focus on where I wanted to go. The heat became just shy of unbearable, and then – the pressure lifted, all at once. My sister’s memories flooded into me, joining with my own until the picture in my head was perfectly clear. And beyond that, I felt almost like it was tied to me, like there was a glowing cord connecting my body to the place I was seeing in my mind. I felt impossibly light, and the way to get there suddenly seemed obvious.

                “Okay,” I said. “Thorn, on the count of three we’re going to jump, and Rana, you’re going to let go.”

                “Okay,” Thorn said quietly.

                “Come see me again sometime when you’re safe,” my sister told me. “We weren’t done talking.”

                I nodded, but there wasn’t time for anything more. “One…two…three,” I proclaimed. Rana’s hands lifted off of mine, and we jumped into the air.

***

                There was a brief moment when we hung in the air and I was sure we’d come crashing back down again, sprawling on Rana’s floor. But then the darkness took me, the same as each time before.

The way I’d justified it was this: each time I’d traveled, I’d gone into the water but emerged somewhere on land. If there didn’t have to be water to end in, maybe there didn’t have to be water to begin with. And if Rana and I were connected by the curse we shared, maybe the place it had been cast had some clinging traces, too.

                We came shooting up out of the well-water and I opened my eyes again in midair. It was just in time me to grab at the lip of the well and let the last bit of our momentum carry us over it. Well, not all the way over it – I hung by my midsection over the edge, feet dangling back toward the water and face pointing at the forest floor. I had had the wind knocked out of me by my impact on the stone.

                “Don’t move,” Thorn grunted. She worked her hands out from under me and then inched forward and rolled off my back. She landed awkwardly on her side on the ground, and then eased me off of the well.

                We both lay in the dirt, not moving and not talking. Finally, when I could breathe again, Thorn wormed her way next to me, tucking her chin against my shoulder and cradling my hand in hers.

                “I have to admit,” I began, “I didn’t really think that would work.”

                “I did,” she said.

 

 


	7. The Woods Again

We fell asleep like that, pressed into the forest floor. When I woke again, it was slowly, crawling up from the molasses depths of sleep. Early morning light was streaming over us through the trees and some quiet night wind had blown leaves across my legs. Thorn’s forehead was nestled against my cheek, her breath on neck.

                Gently as I could, I eased myself up. The well still loomed over us. But as I sat and listened to the small sounds of the forest, and a couple of my own creatures skittering around my feet, I found that it had lost its power as the symbol of my origin. It was a just a stone well in the woods.

                “I’ve never slept outside before,” Thorn said. She was squinting in the new light. I gave her my hand and pulled her to her feet. She kept it.

                “She’s going to find us again, isn’t she. Find me again, I mean.”

                “I think,” I said, not looking directly at her, “all we can do is pick where we want to be. When she catches up. But I don’t know where that should be.”

                She nudged my chin with her fingers so our eyes were meeting. “I don’t know if it matter, where we are. Wherever you think is best. These are your woods.”

                These were my woods. “Aright,” I said. “I have a place to start.”

***

                I helped Thorn carry out the bedspreads, and the cutlery, and the small furniture we could break into firewood. Then I stood in my mother’s empty house.

                She clearly hadn’t taken much with her when she moved. But even standing in the stripped-down room, watching the dust motes drift and the cobwebs flutter, I couldn’t help but feel her presence bearing down on me, the ghosts of my youth swirling around me. The way she kept Rana and I against each other, as children; the way she turned her back on me when my fortunes changed.

                These walls were all I’d thought I had, once. These walls my need to inherit them, to fill the space, no matter the cost.

                “I belong to the forest now, Mama,” I whispered. I caught two snails in my hands. I placed them on the empty table. The last remnants of who I’d been here.

                Then I left.

***

                We walked until we found a small stream. I don’t know how I hadn’t found it on my first venture into the woods, but then again, I didn’t think we were heading towards Ash’s house. We set up in a small clearing. It was as good a place as any to wait, I thought.

                I was building a fire when Thorn approached me, twisting her fingers together, a habit that looked ill-fitting on her. “Can I show you something?” She asked.

                She took me by the hand and tugged me into the woods a few steps. “Look,” she said, pointing to a small rosebush struggling its way upward. “We even have flowers.”

                “That’s lovely.”

                She glanced at me. Standing side by side, she was only a handful of inches shorter than me. “It seemed like you were dealing with a lot of memories at the house. And the well.”

                “I spent my whole life there,” I said. “It wasn’t always happy. Often it wasn’t.”

                She nodded. “That’s how the castle is for me. Lots of good memories, but some pretty powerful ones that aren’t. I’m so glad to be…not there, right now. But,” and she turned herself towards me in a determined way, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I meant to ask, do you have those memories in the woods, too? Here?”

                “No,” I said. “Honestly, out here, it feels untouched.”

                She let out a big breath. “Oh, good. Because I wanted somewhere untouched to, um,” and she reached her hand to my face, brought her face to mine, and kissed me.

                Thorn’s mouth didn’t taste like a curse set or a curse broken. I put my arms around her back and drew us closer together, and she tasted like relief and hope, like walls fading into the forest around me, like the ground growing solid beneath my feet.

***

                When I’d left home, I’d started counting days. Days alone and days with Ash. Days where I spilled more creatures into the world and days where I said nothing at all.

                The time with Thorn in the forest was the first time I stopped counting. I suppose my fingers were otherwise occupied.

                They were carding through her golden hair one overcast afternoon when she told me she didn’t think she wanted to go back.

                “Not ever?” I asked.

                “I don’t know. If I could stay here with you for always, I would. What do you think we’ll do, when this is over?”

                “I stopped planning for the future a long time ago,” I said. And it was true. The thought that, someday, we could just decide where to be was foreign to me. But more than that, in that moment, it was hard to conceive of our little safe haven coming to an end in the first place. We were still waiting for Tamarack, but it was getting easier to imagine she wasn’t coming at all.

                The next morning, we awoke to realize that we’d had a visitor. The ground around our bedding and fire pit was freshly swept clean and there was a pot of porridge bubbling by itself.

                Settled beside the fire, on a small stone, was the golden egg I’d knocked over in Ash’s cabinet all those weeks ago.

                I picked it up. It was warm to the touch. Underneath was a tiny note. It read, _A debt paid. Nurture it._

                I handed the egg to Thorn, but not before instinctively checking to see if my fingers had blistered. “I think this should belong to you,” I told her.

                She was frowning over the note. “What debt?”

                “Do you remember I told you about your witch’s sister, Ash?” We’d agreed not to say Tamarack’s name after what had happened in Rana’s sitting room.

                “Yes.”

                “She told me she owed a debt because she’d told her sister about you. I think. I don’t know the full story.”

                “About me?”

                “Some kind of tip off that lead to you being cursed, anyway. She never told me the details.”

                She looked down at the egg in her hands. “You didn’t tell me I had another ally.”

                We didn’t speak about it any further after that. But she pocketed the egg, and I saw I take it out and run her fingers over it several times over the following days.

 

                The end of our world came not long after that. It was raining.

                Thorn was looking out at the wet, frowning. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “I think there are still some berries on that bush I found yesterday.”

                She shook her head, and then with sudden quickness she dashed out into the rain, planting her feet, raising her arms to the sky, and shouting. “TAMARACK! Are you coming? I’m ready to find out what’s next!”

                Nothing happened. I came out behind her and kissed her neck. “Well, _I’m_ hungry. I’ll be back in a minute.”

                To my displeasure, there were fewer berries than I’d anticipated. I collected them into my hands and turned to go back to the camp.

                My creatures sensed the change before I did. I had built up a small hoard while I’d been there, and as I began to walk, they all ran and leapt onto my limbs. The next moment, a loud _crack_ sounded among the trees.

                I dropped my berries and took off running. I skidded on the mud as I rounded a trunk and into the camp.

                Thorn was still standing, but her wrists and ankles were bound by vines that seemed to have burst from the ground around her. Tamarack was facing her, looking much the same as the last time we’d seen her. It took me a minute to realize that none of the rain was touching her. It made her look immaculate.

                She turned to look at me as I appeared. A slow smile grew on her face. “Violet. I was hoping you would join us. I was just explaining to Thorn here that your little honeymoon is over. I’m still owed a life, and it’s time for me to take what I am owed.”

                I looked wildly between Tamarack, sedate and untouched, and Thorn, struggling against her restraints. I could think of nothing but to scream and rush at the witch, my lizards and snakes and toads springing out before me.

                I hit an invisible wall and bounced back, smacking into the ground as my feet slid out from under me. Tamarack laughed shrilly, but my creatures had gotten through and were biting at her feet. As she focused on vanishing them, I saw Thorn’s vines relax just enough for her to take something from her pocket.

                “Hey!” she shrieked wildly, “hey! Remember me?”

                Satisfied that she’d disposed of my creatures, Tamarack did turn back to her captive, just in time for Thorn to lob the golden egg at her face.

                I have no idea how Thorn managed enough strength and precision with the vines, but it impacted directly on Tamarack’s cheekbone. Now it was her turn to shriek and stagger backwards, as the egg immediately began to melt, transforming into a golden puddle, spreading across her face and down under her collar.

                Thorn’s vines collapsed and I mustered to her side, taking hold of her arm. “What did you do?” I asked.

                “I think I put some of my curse into it, when I was nurturing it, like the note said,” she replied.

                “Borrowed tricks from my meddling sister,” Tamarack sneered, clutching one side of her face, which was starting to lose shape where it had been consumed. “Your life still belongs to me.”

                “You’ve had my whole life!” Thorn spat, holding my hand and taking several steps toward her, angrier than I’d ever seen her. “My whole life I’ve had this curse weighing on me! You could have ended it at any time, but you chose to shape me like this instead, and it’s not yours anymore, alright! It’s my life and I’ve lived it and I’m taking it back from you!”

                Tamarack ceased raking at her cheek, straightened up, and laughed again. The laugh turned into a cough, but her composure was back. “Very well, little princess. Let’s see if we can do something about that, shall we?” And she snapped her fingers.

                Traveling with Tamarack’s magic wasn’t like what I’d done with the water. I didn’t black out, or lose time. I was awake for all of it, what felt like an agonizingly slow journey, every inch we moved. But I was also aware of Thorn’s hand clasped tightly in mine, the whole time.

                When I felt solid ground again, I opened my eyes.

                I almost recoiled in shock. There was no rain here, but there was wind, buffeting my hair and my clothes. We were standing on the edge of a cliff, higher than anything I’d ever imagined, looking down at a crashing sea below. At least, I figured it was the sea. I’d never seen it before.

                Thorn and I were five or six paces back from the edge. Tamarack, however, was closer, in front of us and just a step from the open air. She looked worse after our travel. The gold had begun to fade from her skin, but that only revealed how much she had shrunken and twisted beneath it.

                “What’s happening?” Thorn asked, gasping.

                Tamarack spread her hands wide. She was grinning, wildly, her subtle smirks and sly smiles a thing of the past. “Welcome to the edge of the world, Thorn! You wanted to live your own life, without my influence? Well, here’s your answer. Jump here, and when you surface again, you’ll be free of the curse, back to the ordinary girl you’ve never been.”

                Thorn was clutching my hand and trembling. “It doesn’t look like I’d survive.”

                “You’ll have to trust me, my dear.”

                Thorn looked out at the water, took one half step forward, and then turned back and flung herself at me. “I can’t,” she sobbed into my neck.

                “You shouldn’t,” I told her.

                Tamarack met my gaze over Thorn’s shoulder. “That’s right, little princess,” she said. “This is the only way out, and you can’t make yourself do it. You’re just a halfling crying to another halfling, just a pair of cursed mites who got carried away. That’s what makes you different from us, you know. We understand the greater consequences of taking magic for your own.”

                _Greater consequences_. A whisper of a memory trickled through my mind, and following it came a certainty of what I could do. I looked at Tamarack’s mocking mouth. What I had to do.

                I took Thorn’s shoulders and eased her off of me. Eyes still locked on Tamarack, I asked, “And what if I do it for her?”

                She quirked an eyebrow. “That could be interesting. And I suppose Lindy’s done with you, so be my guest.” She gestured at the edge of the cliff and took a step back.

                Thorn was grabbing at my hands, my arms, looking with despair up into my face. “Don’t, Vi, you can’t,” she pleaded.

                I kissed her as desperately as I had ever wanted to. “Trust me,” I whispered into her mouth. “I’m not going to leave you.”

                Then I stepped away from her. I went and I stood near to Tamarack at the edge of the cliff, my eyes fixed on the horizon ahead.

                “I do understand it, you know,” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could.

                She snorted. “Just get on with it, little halfling.”

                I nodded. Then I clenched my fists and closed my eyes, taking that brief second of darkness to gather up all of myself. Not just my curse, but everything else I was – the power I’d learned I had, the home I’d left and the roaming landscape I’d embraced, my love for Rana and my love for Thorn.

                In all my time with them since I’d been cursed, I’d never learned where the witches came from. Maybe the stories I’d heard growing up were true, and they were born special, or sprung from some older power I would never know. But I thought about Linden’s flightiness, and Ash’s considerations, and Tamarack’s unbridled rage. I gathered up all of myself and I knew that if I wanted to measure up, I had to decide to do so. I had to take the magic that had marked me and redefine myself with it, making myself wholly and completely my own.

_“What happens if another witch touches your stuff?”_

_“If she tried, there would be much greater consequences than your burns.”_

                I opened my hands, turned away from the end of the world, and launched myself at the other witch.

 

 


	8. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first part of this is so short and really should have been appended to the last chapter if I was not eternally bad at planning. But anyway, this is the last one!!

If I had thought about it at all, I had thought that Tamarack’s flesh would sizzle or burn beneath my hands. But it did not do that.

                As I lunged at her, my hands connected with her face and shoulder, shoving her backwards. Then I was pinning her to the ground, my hands locked around her throat, and she was screaming, and she was fading.

                It was radiating out from where our skin touched – her face growing transparent, vanishing from view. Within moments of my attack her jawline was nearly gone, and I could see through her open mouth to the ground below.

                As she struggled, one hand came up and hit me on the side of my head, just above my left ear. Searing pain shot down through my temple and across my skull. But then Thorn was there, grabbing on to the hand and arm and forcing them to the ground.

                “Take. Me. Home,” Thorn shot at Tamarack, through gritted teeth. And then we were moving again.

                I tried to keep my hands on Tamarack’s neck as we were engulfed, but I could feel myself slipping backwards. I heard Tamarack hit solid ground, and then Thorn and I were blasted off of her. I had barely opened my eyes and glimpsed a blur of stone before I crunched to the floor.

                Thorn had been flung not far from me. I wheezed and crawled over to her. Only when I saw she was unhurt did I fully realize where we were.

                We were back in the large hall in Thorn’s castle. She and I had landed just in front of the empty stone thrones. It was as quiet as I had last seen it – still carpeted with dust everywhere.

                Tamarack – and here I had to stare, for she seemed so much more vulnerable than I’d ever seen her – was on her hands and knees. As we watched from our own prone positions, she pushed herself to her feet and fixed Thorn with a glare far more wavering than those we’d had before.

                “Well, little princess, I did as you said,” she told her. She leaned over and spit on the floor. It smoked a little where it hit. “Just as it was when you ran away. Good luck.”

                I saw that, where I had grappled her, she wasn’t transparent anymore, but her skin hadn’t grown back as it had been, either. Ringing her neck, where I’d had my hold, her skin was rough and textured. As if it had been replaced with tree bark.

                “Is that it? You’re done?” Thorn’s voice was shaky.

                Tamarack curled her lip. “Keep your protector away from me and we won’t have a problem.” She left, gliding like an exhausted snake. When she’d gone, the room felt hollowed out.

                Thorn touched my temple, lightly, where I’d been struck. The skin was still sore but her fingertips were a balm. “You’re changing,” she said.

                I reached up with my own hand. My hair had gone from that patch above my ear, and my skin was scaled over, like the back of a lizard.

                Thorn was looking at me. I shrugged. “It’s a small price to pay. Does it make me look more interesting?”

                She laughed and I was relieved to hear that her voice was only a little shaky. “Yes, yes, I don’t know how I’m supposed to introduce you to my parents now.”

                I stood up and pulled her with me. “Are you ready to wake them up?” I asked, studying her face.

                She sighed, and then she looked back at the empty thrones. “I suppose I should stop running away.”

                I caught her cheek in my hand. “Hey. Not running away. Surviving. And if you need to go survive somewhere else, I’ll go with you, no question. But I think you’re ready to give the life back to this place.”

                She nodded very slowly, leaning into my palm. “It’s just that I don’t know what comes after.”

                “Well, if I’m not mistaken, you’re the crown princess, newly returned from certain death, master of her own curse. I think you should have some leverage to figure out what comes next.”

                She grinned at me. “And if they don’t listen, you’ll send snakes at them until they do, right?”

                “I think we might have to negotiate that one a little further.”

                Laughing again, she took my hand and led me out of her throne room. 

 

Epilogue: Some Months Later

                Rana was on her new veranda, absorbing the warmth of one of the last mild days of autumn, when she noticed the shimmer. A spot of air near her house wall seemed to ripple, and then the shape of a person popped into view.

                Rana reached for the knife she’d begun wearing on her calf since the day Violet and Thorn had come and gone. She was no master yet, but she felt that the lessons in using it had been one of the better investments of the unending money.

                The next moment, a familiar figure was standing outside her home, peering into the window, appearing to have not noticed Rana at all. Rana cleared her throat.

                The witch spun about with an exuberance Rana instantly recognized. “Oh, hello!” she said. “I didn’t know you’d be outside.”

                Rana looked pointedly down at the knife she held and then back up at Linden. “What are you doing here?” she asked, using the emotionless tone she’d perfected while negotiating contracts, not letting any jewels or flowers slip.

                Linden flung her hands up and took a step forward. “Please! No need for hostility, dear. I’m just checking in on my favorite. We do that sometimes, nothing to worry about.”

                Rana raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never done that before.” One of the other things she’d purchased after her sister’s abrupt visit was an anti-magic alarm for the house, from a very expensive magician. Then again, it was impossible to know how well it worked.

                Linden deflated rather suddenly and flounced into one of the wicker chairs Rana had placed out. “Alright, so I haven’t. But I wanted to see you and see how you’re doing. I ran out of easy ways to scry on you.”

                Rana sheathed the knife again, going to lean on the back of the other chair. Maybe the witch just wanted to talk herself out a little bit and then go on her way. She was certainly used to that kind of behavior. For some reason, most people who got into the company of a woman famous for what happened when she talked ended up trying to fill the air themselves, as if compensating. “I’m doing fine, clearly,” she said. “But why have you come by now?”

                Linden heaved a most dramatic sigh. “Everyone’s moody. Tam’s licking her wounds still and Ash’s gone all surly but won’t tell me why. Things have gotten so topsy-turvy, I guess I just wanted to make sure I’d gotten this one thing right.” She looked at Rana. “But you seem good, so it’s worked out, and I should stop whining, right? That’s what the others say to me.”

                The veranda was suddenly chillier despite the sun. Rana felt herself growing stiffer. “I said I’m fine. I don’t know what you count as working out. But if you’re here for gratitude, you’re not getting it.”

                Linden’s elegant neck snapped upright and she fixed Rana with a stare. Rana reflexed backwards, but then decided that the witch didn’t look angry, only puzzled.

                “Don’t tell me you’re backwards, too,” Linden said plaintively. “The one I cursed turned out to be grateful for it, and the one I gifted won’t even spare a word of thanks.”

                “Oh, is this really just about Violet?” Rana lost her control and dropped a ruby, cursing herself for letting her emotions out.

                Linden laughed, a callous sound. “No. It’s frustrating that it didn’t work out as I planned, but that child decided to tangle with my sister and I wash my hands of her. They’ll be talking about her story for centuries to come, you know. The awakened princess and her witch queen. But I’m here for you.” Her voice warmed and she reached out a hand to Rana, who did not move. “You’re my success, my pride. Look what you’ve made of yourself.”

                Rana folded her hands over her chest. “You didn’t give me this. You gave me a curse, and I turned it into freedom, but I don’t owe you anything.”

                Linden smiled, a charming smile that Rana had never forgotten. “But that was the point, dearest. I unlocked the potential that you had and gave you a way out. You don’t have to offer me supplication, but we’re bound.”

                Rana could feel her hands clenching into fists and she had to remind herself how to breathe, how to let the anger wash away. “I’m not bound to anyone, not anymore. Now, if you don’t have anything else to say to me, I’m going to request you leave.”

                Linden’s smile quirked, but she stood up, moving to the edge of the veranda and holding up her hands again. “As you wish. I only wanted to stop in and see that you’ve gotten what I wanted for you. All you deserved and more. I knew you could do it, Rana.”

                “I deserved to be loved,” Rana said as the witch faded away.

                When she had gone, Rana leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

                Ever since she and Violet had joined forces to send her and Thorn back to the well, she’d found herself feeling for her curse more and more. In the early days, when she was frantically working to practice her control alone, her throat and mouth had often ached, and she’d guzzled water from that well, seeking relief. When she had managed to take her fate in her own hands after all, that pain had mostly gone, and she’d realized she might have been imagining it all along.

                A few days after Rana had heard rumors about the Princess Thorn’s return, she’d received a letter from her sister. Violet described how she’d wrested her curse into her own hands, marking Tamarack with it. She made it sound like a wild thing, like something alive that lived inside her. Rana couldn’t relate to that at all. Even in her established security, there were days where the whole thing seemed to sit heavy in her stomach, behind her ribs, and on the worst days of all bile rose to her throat when she tried to speak more than a few words.

But today was not one of those days. Today, as she felt the crisp breeze on her face and the sun’s warmth on her hair, the gift she’d never asked for felt sunk into her bones, as part of her as her own flesh, moving through her body like nothing more or less than another measure of her blood.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've read this whole story, thank you!!! I have loved writing it and I hope you have enjoyed reading it :)
> 
> There are a few inspirations I feel I should acknowledge:  
> \- The idea of burning flowers in a sort of magic confrontation, as Rana does in chapter six, comes from chapter five of A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (although I hadn't read that book in a while, and when I went back to check the scene played out differently than I remembered).  
> \- I've read Spindle's End by Robin McKinley approximately a million times, and part of the endgame involves that sleeping beauty grappling her evil fairy; I didn't set out to homage that with Violet and Tamarack's final confrontation, but it ended up with that similarity. 
> 
> Also, there will be a spin-off oneshot following this about the last time Ash got involved with humans, because I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.


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